New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease [...]
It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy [...]
In May 2010 I reviewed the state of Monomorphic as a blog. Since it’s now been almost 13 months since that time, let’s evaluate what’s happened in the meantime. Where am I, how did I get here, and where do I go next? The rate of publication has decreased. Prior to the last evaluation, 55 [...]
As a little fun project, I developed some probabilistic cellular automata with Scala and very basic AWT graphics. I continue to become more proficient with Scala, and it feels increasingly natural to use. During this exercise I came up with something that I thought was particularly elegant, and that I am pretty sure would have [...]
After 13 months and 51 posts, my experiments in blogging continue, although they are perhaps better described as polymorphic than monomorphic. Maybe it’s time for some reflections. On the whole blogging in this format and at this frequency has been a pretty fun and fulfilling process. I get to practice writing free-form, nonscientific texts, and [...]
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